A Better Christmas

It’s funny to think about the children you want to have and how many holiday and familial traditions you’d like to preserve when you spent so much time hating growing up.  Not hating growing up as in getting older and maturer.  I feel I’ve sort of slipped back a few steps from my youth.  Mostly because I’m no longer being driven like a slave to get great grades, that and I’ve come to the realization that other people can’t rule your life and that their disappointment in you should not make you feel worthless.  Their disappointment stems from their own expectations of you and tends to never match your own expectations of yourself.  This, like all things, is a double-edged sword since sometimes people can see quite clearly your wasting potential.  But I suppose, in the end, it is your life to live and your choices to make and what they see as potential may just be an unhealthy optimistic expectation more fueled by a personal desire to vicariously feed off your success than a true desire for your happiness.

Christmas is probably my favorite holiday.  Normally, I favor my birthday, but the truth is, Christmas is wondrous.  There is good cheer all around.  There are a lot of Scrooges and humbugs, too, but the world tends to be trying to be a bit selfishly selfless which I dont’ think is all that bad of a thing. 

Last Christmas and New Years was a disaster.  The landlord had ransacked the house taking all the furniture, shutting off the utilities and running off with our security deposits.  A house full of roommates and the owners were scrambling and panicking trying to figure out what to do.  We all lost our security deposits and never recovered them.  I scrambled to get the money together to pay Neetha early to take over the house…right as I was buying gifts for the whole family and attempting to fly home.  We managed to get all the utilities back on, the rent went up on the house a bit, and the roommates were all pissed because I was taking a reduced rent rate in return for being the one responsible for paying the owner.  In other words, I was sub-letting to them and charging them a price that reduced the amount I would lose each month.  They found this vey unfair and said that the risk I was taking wasn’t really worth the bonus.  That January one roommate disappeared, moving out in the middle of the night and never coming back, leaving me to pay his share of the security deposit and rent.  Another roommate would lead me on for several months paying me back for late rent in small installments and ending with stiffing me the last utility bill.  So the risk, I think, was clear and while they all bitched about trusting them, two stabbed me in the back nearly immediately.

Ontop of all this, the former landlord had run off with my bed.  So I was sleeping on a couch with some blankets, very few blankets because I had expected the heat to work in the house and for the most part it did…but sometimes, it was damn cold.  I was trying to save up for a bed and mattress then, for a lot of small things that would finally make a place home and I pretty much re-bankrupted myself between all the down payments, Christmas gifts and whatnot.  I also made a landmark Christmas gift purchase for myself that year to try and cope with the next part of the last season.

At the same time, I was dealing with a break-up.  It was not a good one in the slightest.  It was not good because nobody supported me then either.  See, I’ve done distance relationships for pretty much my entire life now.  I can’t rightly say what it was about them that happened…but mostly it was my romantic notion that a love can survive no matter the miles.  I watched too many sweeping British epics perhaps and we Americans just can’t handle that kind of conviction…or maybe it is just wrong to expect so much from another person.  I would never say it was easy for me to be apart from someone I cared for.  It’s always hurt and the angst is wearing.  But somehow I always managed and the other side just fell apart.  I admit that there were times where I broke down, too.  I always regretted those failures.   I regretted leaving Rachel.  I regretted giving up on Sarah.  Hell, I regretted the ones who broke up with me.  My heart is always bleeding.  In honesty, I don’t mind it that way.  It hurts, but, as the line from the movie "Bandits" goes, "I think it’s better to feel too much than to feel too little."

The break-up I won’t go into.  It may be cathartic but I’m not sure anyone needs to hear it since they’ve all heard about it before.  Let us just say it was messy, compounded all the other issues, and dragged on in a bizarre and silly way that I at the time couldn’t handle.  I was also really sick with the flu at the time.

I flew home for Christmas to discover that our Christmas traditions were pretty much dead and gone.  A few gifts, no games, a good meal as always, and then off to bed.  I had brought gifts for everyone but I had been told I had to limit how much I spent on people because they didn’t want to feel guilty for not buying me much.  Which wasn’t the point but I did it anyway.  And honestly, it spoiled my Christmas.  I had good gift ideas and for the first time in my life I had a good job that was pulling down good money…I was free from my parents’ stupid rules about not having a job while being in college cuz I wasn’t in college anymore.  And man the ideas that danced in my head.  Those ideas are dead and buried.

I came back for a New Years party that did not happen.  Greg and I made the usual fair which was excellent, but he and I walked through a pitch black house empty of furniture and of people, watched a movie, and I fell asleep before the stroke of midnight in North Hollywood hoping for a few phone calls that never came and surrounded by gifts I had bought that I couldn’t give because the person who was to receive them had told me they would throw them away.  I made a few random calls to other people and spilled out problems that they didn’t want to hear I’m sure.  It was miserable.  I was miserable.

This year promises to be a great Christmas…one that makes the last one worth it.  Kristen is wonderful and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone.  It breaks my heart sometimes to think of how much less haunted and complicated I was when I was younger and that she has to deal with me as I am.  I’d say I’d change, but I really don’t want to.  It’s the stubborn streak in me that doesn’t believe you have to give up the past to enjoy the future.  I think so many people live in denial of what has happened to them that they insulate themselves to the world and stop feeling and I have to learn to at least not over-compensate by feeling everything all the time.  What helps me is being blessed to have a wonderful and brilliant girlfriend not afraid to speak her mind and a very insightful best friend, who, for whatever truth there is to her deserving her English degree or not, she seems to be able to speak in a way that resonates with my mind.  They both do.  Sometimes I have to give it a bit of quiet time to a

ccept it.  But I come around. 

We will see what happens with this New Years.  It had at one time promised to be fantastic and now seems more akin to possibilities of Titus Andronicus.  Who knows for certain.  All I know is that I’m happy.  I really am very very happy and very blessed.  I just have to show it more and stop letting emotions cloud over absolutely everything.  I hope you all have a wonderful week.